Make Less the Depth of Grief
by jenni3penny
Summary: Kibbs, via the Five Stages of Grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Five chaps total.
1. Chapter 1

She was in denial, isolating herself from reality and creating a world that existed only in the lithe movements of her body. He watched her move that world from a distance and through glass, keeping his eyes on the languid but intentionally arched motions she made. He didn't know much about dance, couldn't tell too many kinds from another. Looked like ballet but... not. There was more energy to it but still some kind of arching grace that made him think she should have been on a stage somewhere instead of mucking around in blood and photographing dead bodies and what the hell had she been thinkin'? Joining the Secret Service? Getting caught up with Kerry and then ending up stuck with him and his and sitting across from DiNozzo's spit balls?

She coulda been... should have been...

He was in denial as he watched her, his hand firmly grasped around a disposable cup as he ignored the other dancers, silently sipping and following the grace of her movements through the window. Lying to himself when he told his conscience that he was just looking out for one of his most efficient, most adept, most prized agents.

It hadn't been an easy case for her – not that any of them were especially easy. They were the major case team for a reason. Major sort of implied that very little would be minor, easy, or ultimately emotionally acceptable. She usually handled it better than this, though. She was usually stoic and professional and he often proudly adored the fact that she could disassociate and detach long enough to get the job done. She _usually_ operated cleanly, confidently, without second guessing herself.

But then, the job didn't generally involve a small child being strangled by an electrical cord.

(Of all the simplest little things... a thin string of plastic and fibers to choke out such a miraculously intricate little body. The gratuitous complexities of science sometimes made no sense to him, as Abby would be quick to point out. The ability of something so innocuous to remove something so fantastical from the world would never settle well within the confines of his brain - nor would it in hers.)

She was out of her brain at the moment, though. Out of her head and letting her body sweep through movements that seemed happily relaxed, regardless of how difficult they probably were to actually complete.

And he _usually_ handled his surreptitious watching a little better than this.

It didn't generally involve parking across from the dance studio she'd tried to keep secret from all of them and especially from DiNozzo, maybe doubly especially from him (though he wasn't sure why).

He watched the other watchers for awhile as she repeated steps, could nearly smile at gaping children as they stumbled after their mother's tugging hands because they were entranced by the dancers on the other side of the glass. He watched some women avert their heads while others smiled entirely. He noted how many men intentionally kept themselves from openly staring at the window as they walked by (probably to completely avoid being labeled as perverts).

He realized he looked a bit like a pervert himself.

Didn't honestly give two shits in the woods, though.

He was primarily only watching her – and not because he wanted to cache the ghosting gracefulness of her movements for later recollection.

(Well, not only... because he knew this vision was something that would haunt him. How winsomely long she seemed as she stretched into arches and curves. How strong her tight and toned body actually was as most of her weight went to one foot and tipped in a way that should have thrown her off balance but just graced her angling steeply. How gently flexible she was even as her body seemed sturdy and silk at once. Sweet Christ, he wasn't gonna get away from _any_ of it any time soon.)

But, all in all, he was watching her because she'd been extraordinarily deep in eyes-open-heart-shut denial since he'd placed her by the body of a six year old boy and asked her to be just as stone a wall as he was.

(Right?)

Kate wasn't like him.

At least she wasn't _at all_ like him when she wasn't being _exactly_ like him.

But Kate, in her secret escape, didn't even necessarily seem like _Kate_.

She seemed so much more relaxed and peaceful and paced and warm.

(He would have felt guilty for upturning the rocks she kept pressed down on her secrets if it weren't for the fact that he kept telling himself that he needed to make sure she was processing, accepting, that he needed to guard her mental health just as well as he did her physical. That it was his goddamn job to protect the whole and not just what she allowed him to protect. He would have felt guilty if he hadn't already silently accepted that watching sentry over her was his only emotionally viable way of really, _really_ , loving her.)

His reverie rattled when he turned away from watching a little girl stare open mouthed at the window, the chuckle trickling dry in his throat as he realized she was sharply watching him back through the glass. Those lithe and bending movements had gone entirely still and she had one palm pressing the glass as she interestedly studied him back.

He'd expected, in the event that he ever did get caught, that she'd be furious. Or somehow, in her Kate way of things, upset. Maybe shaken by the fact that he'd seen something of her that she'd obviously kept to herself, like her drawings had been at first. But she just angled her head at him, allowing him to really see how delicately girlish she looked when her hair was piled up into a messy knot.

And he flinched when she bent away from the spot a moment, turning back to it with a familiar bag, her hands swift as she stayed leaned near the window and scribbled something onto her sketchpad.

Little tease...

She damn well knew he couldn't look away if he was waiting for anything she had to say that seemed pertinent (despite how ridiculous he suddenly felt in the middle of the street).

The sketchpad was lifted lightly against the glass and he squinted hard to read it, ignoring the flash of a grin that brightened her lips when she caught the movement.

 _'Girls need coffee too, Gibbs.'_

He willfully gave up the irrepressible grin that tended to surface whenever she caught him loving her from a distance and stretched his left hand through the open driver's side window. The sign stayed in place and her head tipped to the right of it, a smile flashing on her again when he simply lifted the second cup into her line of vision. She lifted her right hand in acceptance of the gift, a motion for him to stay and wait and still be there when she stepped out of her self-made state of delusion.

He figured as she stepped out the door that she didn't consciously understand that he always _was_ still there. That she hadn't yet realized that he made sure to be just outside the border of her denial, her anger, her detachment from their day-to-day disappointments. That he made sure he was there should she stumble while crossing the (street) line between the comfort of denial and the sharpness of their combined reality.

And that was fine with him, really. Especially when she jogged across the street in clothing that barely covered her and her hair so messily tied back that sweat was pasting strands of it in spirals against her neck and throat. He could lick those curving lines and never end the tracing of his tongue, up and down and around them over and over again. The smile she gave him said she knew exactly that. In the long run... he was fine with that too. Because she never actually dared make him admit to it, so it never really bore any proper weight between them.

"What are you doing here?" She accepted the coffee into both hands, skepticism in her eyes even as she sniffed at it and smiled into the sweet scent of cream. "Following me?"

"Just checking in." It was the truth, in some way. "Doin' okay?"

"Mostly." She sipped at the coffee like it had traitorously shared some secret of his affection with her and she spread its leftover across her lips with her tongue, letting him watch the movement. Whatever secrets she shared with her cup were the same as the ones that she kept when she danced, when she dropped every-armored-thing that she put on over her skin and clothes in the morning just to get through whatever possible horror he could show her.

And he wanted them, those secrets, all of them. Maybe he wanted the ease of that ability to deny reality for an hour. And wasn't that a strange(ly terrifying) realization to have when she couldn't seem to stop so smugly smiling at him.

She wasn't a proper match for him when he was motivated by such a specific desire, though.

"Water too." He offered it softly, nodding toward the open window without letting her eyes move away from his. "In the truck. If you need it."

She wasn't armed for anything when she was still near humming a fantasy from her throat and fresh bared skin and he could hear more of it than she possibly knew.

"How'd you know?" Kate perked at him quietly, head jerking back toward the brick and glass building before taking another sip from her cup. "About this place?"

"I know you, Kate."

She squinted at him briefly, as though simultaneously amused and confused by how softly he'd said it. "Bullshit."

He coughed a laugh between them and dropped a glance down the front of himself, avoiding staring down the front of her when she was so skillfully and meticulously trained in her watching. "Hardware store's a block up. Saw your car a couple months ago. Found you in the window."

As though it had been hard to find her at all. The form of her was something he could track through walls and glass and farther across streets than she could imagine. Farther than he'd _ever_ let on.

"I'm okay, Gibbs." She nodded it softly as she gave him a more mellowed glance, letting it blanch toward sincerity and seriousness rather than any accusation or teasing. "Getting there anyhow. You?"

His feigned shrug matched how hard she was trying to pretend that reality was okay with her (failure on both their parts). "Getting there."

"What are you doing here?"

"I told you." He lowered his voice and avoided watching her kiss her lips along the cup again, already annoyed that she was so sweet to his gift and still so cautious of him giving it to her. "Checking in."

"On me."

Of course, yes, on her. He'd known DiNozzo's trajectory was home for the comfort of beloved cinema and equally adored sleep. McGee was probably alcoved in front of his home computer, making sweet technological love to binaries and codes and whatever the hell else it was he rambled about.

"Yup." Of course on her.

Because he'd had to be sure that her form of emotional aversion was a healthy one, one that would help and not hinder. One that would bring her back to him.

Her face mingled a coquette of a smile with the tease in her voice. "Voyeur."

"I was watching your eyes, not your..." Gibbs set his now empty cup to the hood of the truck as an intentional distraction, noting the way her nose wrinkled into a smile as she noticed his awkward shifting. "How do you know the movements if you keep them closed? You can't see the instructor."

Her eyes narrowed as though she was trying to discern why he could possibly be so interested, as though watching her dance hadn't balled heat in his stomach and made his hands flex tight. "She calls them out. I don't need to see her."

Gibbs nodded briefly, not removing the brightness of his eyes from the glossy questioning of her darker ones.

"So close 'em." He shrugged it over her, caught how her fingers tensed around the cup he'd brought her before she just reflexively did as told.

Her smile flushed more whimsical than he'd expected as she let her lashes dip closed, her body slacking relaxed into his order and the utterly familiar tone he'd leaned over her. "What are you doing?"

"Instructing." He studied the close and flushed prettiness of her face, noted how sweat had sheened on her. "Relax. Head up."

"Gibbs."

It was sweetest and softest (and least _him_ ) way he could think of to bring her out of that solo fantasy world she'd been intentionally drowning herself in – kissing her coffee traced lips and letting a fingertip turn the sweated rounding of one loose tendril of her hair.

There was a millisecond of a moment wherein he questioned the decision to draw her out of it at all.

(And why not let her stay there? Where children weren't gruesomely murdered and she wasn't the single woman standing beside a tortured little body wondering if she really, really, _actually_ wanted to be a mother someday?)

At least until she pulled him jerking closer and breathed her tongue against his, gasping a moaned relief into his mouth as he finally kissed her like he goddamn meant it.

Maybe... maybe he wasn't pulling her out of denial – maybe she was just sinking him in.


	2. Anger

He'd stalked her to the range and she'd damn well known he was there because...

Well, because all five senses seemed to be permanently and continually triangulating the proximity of his presence. It didn't matter when, didn't matter where. If he was in the vicinity, her body had honed itself to knowing exactly how far (how close?) and what his most direct path toward her would be. She liked to think it was a woman thing, really – although, he himself was fairly adept at knowing the exact moment certain presences darkened his door. But then, considering how otherwise macho and manly he seemed, his fairly famous gut instinct seemed almost nearer a woman's intuition. She quietly appreciated that someone so sometimes unconsciously chauvinistic would put so much faith in something that could be considered more feminine mystique.

And, well, maybe that was what really alerted her to his presence behind her.

That thing in her he'd tried to train and sharpen and mold more than anything else.

Sixth sense: the unquestioned impulse to trust and rely solely upon her better instinct, the judicious scales her morals made of her guts.

So she did.

And she let her entire body tip back into the unspoken and unwarned presence of him as she lowered the firearm.

He laughed, quietly and all with breath, but it was still a laugh. It still made a smile almost creep past how jittery and furious the rest of her frame still was. "This isn't a trust exercise, Kate."

Then he shouldn't have let his hands catch her ribs so perfectly easily, with such sturdy support and closing fast around how small she was in the middle compared to him.

He shouldn't have followed her if he didn't want her to lean on him.

They both damn well knew it (because this _wasn't_ the first time and it sure as hell _wouldn't_ be the last).

"Why'd you follow me?" She hadn't taken off the ear muffs, head turned as she demanded a response. She hadn't needed to in order to hear how loudly close he'd become.

He slid them down the back of her hair and let them loose around her neck himself, his fingers lifting back up to wipe once on the crown of her head. "Because you're still angry. Anger needs an outlet."

"He killed her, Gibbs." She wasn't sure if he was offering to be that outlet or just subtly commenting on where she'd chosen to go at five thirty in the morning when she was beyond frustrated, light years past exhausted, and still couldn't find a balance to her insides. "I know he did. I know - "

"I know, Kate," the agreement he gave her was more sad than angry and she winced against how softly he'd said it, slightly betrayed by the fact that he'd chosen to be far more passive in his fury than usual.

She didn't understand him sometimes (and especially not when he was curving both palms from her ribs to her back, incrementally stroking them up her spine with pressure in the heels of them, forcing her stance straighter and sharper).

"He murdered her," Kate spit out aside, sure she couldn't meet his softness in this.

Sure that it would only serve to remind her that he would, inevitably, always handle this sort of gutted and castrated frustration with more ease than she would.

The fingers of his right hand caged around the back of her neck, brushing up under her hair and the head gear to right the anatomy of her neck, straighten it with sure fingers and force her head up despite how low she'd felt it go. "Yeah, he did."

He was making her stare at the target with his fingertips putting pressure on her skull, his hand the ever-present control.

He was making sure she couldn't look at him as he gently kissed the side of her head and rubbed his lips into her hair.

"He got away with it."

"So far." The rub of careful words in her hair was a familiar movement of his mouth – and what he said never really seemed to matter so much as the gentled pressure of his affection wiping through darker hair than was his norm. "Relax your shoulders."

"I want him dead."

She knew he'd never believe that bitterly weak tone of voice and the grunt he made near the back of her ear proved the assumption correct. He had the uncanny ability to know exactly what feeling was going to responsively rise higher than the others. His eyes had a habit of softening before she even realized she was going to be sad, glittering before she'd even managed to wit up a taunt or a tease.

"No, you don't," Gibbs unnecessarily admonished as his left foot broached between hers and he kicked against her instep lightly, nudging at her right foot while his hips drove into her and she let her eyes slide closed into how deftly he managed to rub his groin right into her ass. "Feet, Todd. Pay attention to your feet."

No guilt to the movement, either. Not while his palms both cradled on her pelvis and she let her eyes open again to the reality of his (accepted and sometimes secretly appreciated) control over her. No guilt or hesitation as he jerked her hips tighter and closer and fit the breadth of himself around the smaller and more compact stretch of her. Like he owned the mathematical equation to each and every one of her curves. It was infuriating and strangely comforting at once (because she'd _never_ let another man who didn't routinely share her bed slide against her that way but, Christ in Heaven, when he did it... it was so safely assuring somehow).

Still, she let her voice carry a little acid. "I know how to shoot."

"No, right now you know how to rage." And he was more than patient with it, surprisingly. His tone was just a low laid breathiness along the shell of her ear as his palms closed back along her ribs and rubbed open up and down the sides of her, urging but calming and curing at once. "Now control it. Use it."

Anger, he'd told her, needed an outlet.

She'd unconsciously chosen a gun and some alone time with the fantasy of a (paper cut-out) murderer in front of her – one she could finally punish for so grossly disregarding basic human decency. Seemed, though, that his anger needed more than one outlet - because he'd chosen the gun, the fantasy, and her. And he didn't seem to care who could be watching when his hand lifted, stroked and squeezed her already tautened wrist, the movement a catalyst to her own flex of fingers.

He timed the nip of his teeth along the side of her neck to the squeeze of her fingers, his other hand cradling under one of her breasts and rubbing heat as he just trusted that she'd hit the target square on.

It's what he'd taught her to do, really. Squeeze and release and rage and love at once. Kiss and kill and self flagellate to the echo of combined breathing. It wasn't the first time they'd had this lesson. It wasn't gonna be the last, either. She was sure of that, in some unquestionable way. And if she was simply angry now, he'd be furious (with his nails digging her hips and kisses and tongue along her throat) by the time they were done.

Sometimes his only patience was in absolving her rage.

But then... sometimes her rage was dissolved only by his patience.


	3. Bargaining

The whistle had been familiar, sharp and slacking her movements still. For a moment at least. Because then she had intentionally ignored it.

"C'mon, Kate." His body was leaning onto the pliant rails of the sparring ring and she could hear some sort of mangled pleading in his tone, the nearest he would probably come to it anyhow.

Her fist landed solid into the center of the weight bag anyhow.

She wasn't in the mood to give in to him. She'd trade punches with this inanimate object rather than verbally spar with him. It was such an easy bargain to make – physically raging so that her mind didn't have to do it. And, frankly, she was just so tired of giving in to him. Over and over and over again. And it had nothing to do with the fact that he was her superior (sure fucking thought he was superior to her in every way, didn't he?). It had everything to do with the fact that he never allowed himself that same damn weakness.

Maybe she wanted to be his hero some days.

Or rather, maybe and more likely, this time she just wanted to blame him for everything.

They'd become exceptional at making each other their primary targets.

"This is stalking, Gibbs." She landed another solid swing into the bag, checking how wildly it swung away from her, forcing herself to re-position in response to its unpredictable wavering.

"If I were stalking you, Caitlin," he said it terrifyingly slowly, like a threat to her senses and intentionally designed to pull at her edges, "you'd never know it."

She couldn't let him keep winning so easily.

Because this time... this time it'd gotten someone killed.

"I'm busy."

And it'd keep getting people dead if they didn't just... stop.

"Get over here." The authoritative switch of his tone was something that usually would stir her into action, remind her that they had a job to do, a responsibility, but now... "Now."

Now it was more a reminder of how sensually deep his voice could go when he was telling her how much he loved the taste of her swilling around in his mouth.

How much he wanted to just slide his tongue inside her while his hands bruised her thighs and then stroked their apologies with an unbearable lightness.

How sweet his hands curving on her stomach and pressing lightly down could feel when he just kept his mouth going on her until she imploded.

Now it just served to remind her how he groaned in his sleep like all his realities were being choked out just before he said -

"Caitlin."

 _Shannon_ , actually.

Usually, when his voice trembled this murderously low and aching, he was talking to his dead wife in his sleep.

It was the only secret she could manage to keep from him.

Because he wouldn't forgive himself if he knew.

"You shoulda let me go in there." She finally swung away from the punching bag, letting it bump up along her back as it came her way and slump her forward as she lifted a hand in his direction. "Maybe I could have - "

"You don't get to question the choices I make." Bargaining with a bag obviously wasn't going to work because his voice said he was more than prepared to hash this out and he didn't plan to lose the argument, didn't plan to let it end without some sort of resolution that appeased him. "Casey's dead and you're still breathin'."

But not easily, she mused. Breathing should have been easier than having to gasp past fisted lungs and horrified self-reproach.

"You should have - "

"Kate." The supposedly relaxed lay of his body against the ropes disappeared and he was suddenly so much taller than her, so much larger than life and so goddamn sure that he'd made the right choice, that he'd been so very correct and satisfied in his sacrifice. "He's dead. You're not. It's an acceptable loss."

"Acceptable?! It should have been me. I could have - "

"What? Coulda what? You coulda convinced a killer not to kill somebody, Agent Profiler? Get over yourself." He said it while turning from her, loosing the words into the spacious air around them and letting them echo how darkly they were made. "Charming as you may be, sweetheart, I wasn't sending you into that room."

Screw him and his smug condescension, the very voice he used when he was fed up with fighting and he knew he could shut her down with an uncurbed tone and pointed words.

Screw him and his ability to hurt her by just speaking so slowly and pointedly, quietly.

Screw the ease with which he made her feel like she was two inches tall.

She wasn't in the mood.

"Derek Casey was a decorated agent." She threw it at him just as pointedly, as quietly. She wasn't in the mood to let him so easily win anymore. "Three kids, married twenty two years. You know that?"

"Yes, I do. He knew the risks and he was trained for exactly that situation. He was aware of the possible outcome."

"Little League coach." She accused, kept her voice hardened. "Helped Abby at the soup kitchen sometimes."

"It was an acceptable loss." The whispered tone, the lowness of his usually perfectly pitched shoulders, told her that he didn't believe a damn word of what he was saying.

That he was only saying it to try and force his head, and hers, to accept it.

Well, she couldn't just accept it this time. No matter what his reasoning was. "His death is not an acceptable result, Gibbs."

The speed with which he turned his entire body back to her was near unnatural, every inch of him riveting an anger she hadn't seen in months on months. And never directed at her, never so evenly thrown in her direction. "Your death is was not an acceptable possibility, Kate."

And there it was, really... That was his truth, wasn't it? His final explanation. His very version of fact. There wasn't a shifted variation of their world in which he ever, ever, would have let her into that room. Because she was Kate, his Kate. And she was just plainly _not allowed_ to enter into a situation so obviously deadly while he was capable of sending someone else in her stead. She wasn't allowed alone in a place where he just couldn't see what danger might come at her from any direction.

No wonder he'd been so deliriously happy that she'd resigned from the Secret Service. Kept her from being a lamb, stupidly leaning into certain slaughter.

No wonder he'd offered her a place where he could prowl and watch whatever may threaten her.

"Your... how you feel about me as a person should have no bearing on - "

"It was his job and it got him killed." He was right, if she were to step closer to logic and farther from him. Casey had known what the job entailed, had been long aware that someday, at some obscenely surreal moment, it could end every little thing. "Accept that. You can't change it."

The fact that he had been a bravely aware man, stepping into a situation that could kill him, seemed to only fuel her guilt, her shame.

"But I could have - "

"There was _nothing_ you could do, Kate." Gibbs grit the words quieter, blinking as he shook his head and lowered his body and suddenly he was nearer to her in this remorse. He was closer as he crouched and she could see in dulled blue eyes that he was so very angry with her, but so legitimately in love with how tightly this was twisting on her.

It was familiar to him, she assumed. Because he carried guilt with him like it was his wallet, tucked safely in a pocket and checked randomly throughout the day just to be sure it was still close to him.

His guilt, the way he wore it, held it... he hadn't necessarily realized what he had done.

It was suddenly so obvious to her. That he hadn't known he'd hidden her from danger until after another man had died as a result of choosing to keep her close rather than letting her try to talk a madman down.

He hadn't known he was doing the killing until Casey had stopped breathing.

"There was nothing you would allow me to do, Gibbs." She accused softly, shaking her head as she stepped closer into the side of the ring's foundation, letting her hands press into the floor of it near his feet.

"You're goddamn right." His voice had actually whip-cracked his anger over her sharply enough to make her flinch, her head snapping back so that she could watch him exhale into the loudness of his own sudden and shocked silence.

He'd done this (and distinctively chosen to do it, even if unconsciously).

No, correction, _they'd_ done this. They'd managed it together, blinding themselves to consequences.

They'd signed a warrant on another agent's death the first time they'd let themselves fall into each other.

Kate blinked rapidly, shaking her head against a rise of bile tinted guilt, "We can't do this anymore."

His hand shot between the ropes and caught against her shirt with a horrifying speed, a quick but tight lightness that reminded her that no matter how big or lankly or long he was – he could quietly kill and murmur that death on her lips without remorse. He did too, jerked her hands and breasts into the flexible roping as his head leaned and his eyes glittered hard over her face just before kissing her roughly and assuredly and so strongly that she hadn't the time to catch her breath. It was the angriest kiss she'd ever felt off his lips but, somehow, it still tasted utterly of him and his adoration of her. It still had her moaning as he sighed his tongue to hers and let their mouths together in mingling sadness.

Gibbs minutely shook his head after brushing off her lips, negating her statement entirely. "Watch me."

He'd brokered a Devil's Deal long before deciding another agent should take her place, possibly the first time he'd dropped her into his bed and licked along her collarbone.

He'd bargained another man's death for her life and disregarded his guilt in doing so (tried to anyhow).

She could taste the leftover bitterness of that sacrifice on her lips, even as his other hand gripped into her hair and stilled her argument.

They'd signed this deal together, really.

Shared guilt was both punishment and reward.

"Just watch me."


End file.
